


Introspection on Growing Up in Eerie

by flashforeward



Category: Eerie Indiana
Genre: Gen, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24354784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashforeward/pseuds/flashforeward
Summary: The older he gets, the less weird Eerie seems.
Relationships: Marshall Teller & Simon Holmes
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Small Fandoms Fest





	Introspection on Growing Up in Eerie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Deifire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deifire/gifts).



> Written for Small Fandom Fest.
> 
> Prompt: Eerie, Indiana, Marshall, He's no longer quite as convinced the weirdness isn't all in his own head

The older Marshall gets, the less weird Eerie seems to be.

He tries not to examine it too much, but he can’t help it sometimes. Especially since Simon is still his best friend and is still absolutely convinced that Eerie, Indiana is the weirdest place in the world.

\--

For Marshall’s sixteenth birthday, Simon pinches every penny and gets him a new camera and Simon is so excited to sit out back and watch for UFOs that Marshall doesn’t have the heart to say no, to tell Simon he doesn’t think they’ll see any, that he doesn’t believe in all that anymore.

So they sit out back and watch the night sky and Marshall falls asleep at one point and is woken by Simon shaking him and excitedly shouting his name and pointing at a distant speck up among the stars. Marshall snaps a picture more out of obligation than anything else and then he insists it’s time they go to bed and trudges up to his room with a disappointed Simon trailing behind him.

\--

A week later, Marshall picks up the film from that night at the World O’Stuff and he and Simon sit sipping black cows and flipping through photos. But there’s nothing but blurry specks on a blue-black backdrop.

“Sorry, Simon,” Marshall says, handing the photos to his most trusted associate. “Maybe next time?”

“Yeah,” Simon says. He tucks the pictures into his notebook – _field journal_ – and is very intent on drinking his milkshake for a few minutes before he looks at Marshall with that gaze that makes Marshall feel like Simon can see into his soul. “You didn’t think they’d come out, did you?”

“They never do,” Marshall says, trying to sound nonchalant. It’s true, but he worries briefly that Simon has figured out how to read minds and can tell that while Marshall is glad to do things with Simon, he’s stopped expecting that their investigations will lead to anything. Because aliens aren’t real and neither is bigfoot or nessie or demons and Elvis died years ago and the only conspiracy going on at City Hall is Capitalism.

And that’s going on everywhere.

Because the older Marshall gets the more certain he is that Eerie was never weird. Marshall was.

He was thirteen and uprooted from his life and he didn’t want to go and he knew Eerie could never live up to New Jersey so he created a narrative in his head where Eerie was full of the strange and the supernatural and it was his job to investigate that, to bring it to light, to show everyone that the town they lived in wasn’t squeaky clean and normal.

Because squeaky clean and normal was boring and Marshall didn’t want his town to be boring.

But now, three years later, he’s realized how silly he was being and while he’ll do what he can to keep Simon’s belief in the impossible going – because Simon deserves to have impossible things – he still wishes they could do something else once in awhile.

\--

Sometimes, Marshall goes up to the secret spot and reads through his old notebooks, reliving those early days in Eerie. He cleaned out the evidence locker shortly after his birthday – tossing things like the petrified baloney sandwich that had been stinking up the attic for three years – and he passed some items on to Simon in a serious ceremony where he assured his most trusted associate that he could handle his own version of the evidence locker. Yes, even with Harley. He’d also given Dash X the _everything I know about Dash X_ file, apologizing profusely for how judgmental and distrusting he had been.

Dash just took the notebook with a grunt and wandered off to wherever he was living now, leaving Marshall standing awkwardly in front of the World O’Stuff.

Now, in the secret spot, Marshall closes the last of his notebooks and sits back in his chair, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that he ever believed any of that.

A warehouse of lost things beneath Indiana? An entire hour separate from the rest of the time-space continuum? That he met himself as an old man?

He chuckles and closes up the evidence locker, its contents now sparse and never looking to grow. He was a weird kid, he thinks as he fixes the padlock in place – he might be done investigating the weirdness, but that doesn’t mean he wants Syndi sneaking up to mess with his stuff when she’s home from college. 

With a sigh, he gets up and heads downstairs. He has a pile of homework he should get through before dinner and he told Tod he’d listen to his band’s latest demo and get back to him on it, so he should do that, too. He wonders for a moment if that’s part of why he’s gravitated away from the parabelievable – the older he gets, the more there is to do, so his life is getting more interesting so he doesn’t have to make stuff up anymore.

He hopes Simon gets there eventually, too.

He doesn’t want Simon to lose his sense of wonder, of course, but believing in things that so clearly aren’t real is definitely a kid thing and while Simon’s had to grow up more than he should have already, Marshall can’t ignore that he’ll have to accept that this isn’t real eventually

\--

(Simon Holmes stands in the middle of the Eerie woods, in the center of a protection circle with a summoning circle across from him, and he starts up his chant for the third night in a row. He hopes this time something will bite because he needs to speak to _something_ about this and he’s exhausted his options within Eerie itself. Mr. Radford is as cryptic as ever, the Mayor won’t return his calls, and Mr. and Mrs. Teller humor him but don’t believe him when he tries to explain that something is wrong with Marshall.

He wants answers but, more than that, he wants his best friend back.)


End file.
